I spend time rambling around on a few websites.  Writing sites, social media sites, sites which are primarily designed to enable me to stare at photosets of scenes from my favourite TV shows and read what other people have analysed in detail about the specific placement of a flowerpot in the background of one scene and how that adds to someone's tragic and unspoken backstory...at least as far as my use of them suggests.  Let's just go with that being the actual purpose - some people may also post photographs of coffee or flowers or some stuff like that, but as that has nothing like the artistic or philosophical meaning of a set of six photographs of Will Graham from Hannibal, or a deep musing upon the true nature of Hermione Granger's worth, I am going to ignore that section of the site.  They are not my people, though I do sometimes admire their pretty pictures of sunsets with inspirational quotations over the top of them.  I like it even better when someone has managed to make the whole thing be about my favourite TV show, which happens surprisingly often.

I say 'surprisingly'.  Spend any amount of time on certain sites, and this is really more inevitable than surprising.

Last night, as I browsed through fifty pictures of one actor's face (there was a convention for the show this last weekend, which means a lot of photographs of the same people talking to crowds), I saw many comments about the oncoming storm.  Sadly, this was not a Doctor Who reference, or a nod to The Wheel of Time series (though there really should be more of those about).  No.  This was in reference to the actual storm meant to batter the nation.

Maybe it did.  I only had two hours of sleep last night (thanks, exploding demon dog.  How I love cleaning up after you...), and as soon as I got home tonight, I fell asleep.  I have dragged myself awake to write this, but chances are quite good that I will fall aslleeleoeodopppppppppppppppppp...oh, just caught myself, there.  Where was I?  Ah, yes.  My nap has meant I haven't listened to/read the news.

This means I could be wrong.  Perhaps the storm has destroyed all of the country and I am living in the one house still standing.  If, you know, all the houses on my way to and from work have remained in tact at the front, like a many-miles long movie set made up of the remnants of real houses.

On balance, and given the fact that there were still a number of Doncaster Denizens wandering into the road in front of my car on the way home (I like to think this is a local tradition, with prizes and acknowledged local champions), I suspect that the storm did not hit South Yorkshire in quite the way my internet people from the USA thought it would.

There were updates asking everyone to stay safe and stay indoors, to make sure we had enough food and so on.  I checked, just to be thorough.  I had plenty of teabags and enough milk for a few days.  To be extra certain, I also made sure I had enough clean mugs, just in case the power cut out and I could not use the dishwasher.  Three cupboards looked pretty well stocked, so I declared that a good job of preparation and called it a night.

Now, I love the new ways of reaching out which have been offered by the internet (I am ignoring the darker sides, here, as I am talking about being able, finally, to find writers and Geeks to talk to and share ideas with after living in many areas with a seeming lack of such people), and I do not mean to make light of weather and its potential for harm.  The storms in the USA just about a year ago were destructive for many and not something New York was used to, which I mention purely for the reason that it was a storm and a place with a built-up, electricity reliant lifestyle.  OK.  OK.  I admit that Doncaster and New York do not quite come across as identical (I imagine there are fewer animal print, latex dresses in New York, although I suppose it depends what has been touted in the fashion pages that month), but it is similar enough in the sense of daily life and its use of laptops, TVs, electric lighting, the expectation that your living room furniture won't turn into a boat overnight...

In this particular case, I am more thinking about the ways in which social media can be used to spread the word, sometimes in a way which makes more of something than needs to be made.  (Ironically for this blog-post, I just started Much Ado About Nothing with my Year 9 class today)  To read those posts last night, you would have thought I had a very good chance of waking up in the land of Oz.

Just in case anyone is not sure by this point, I did not wake up the owner of a pair of not-quite-new ruby slippers, and if there is a yellow brick road anywhere it must be in such needs of a good street-clean that it is hidden amongst the other roads.  In this one case, I am going to call it; my cyber reality last night was far more dramatic and far more potentially damaging than my actual reality.

Having said that, it also had fewer Red Dwarf quotations pasted over pictures from Supernatural, so on balance I will probably still live in the internet at least some of the time.  I'll just make sure to check out of the window before believing an apocalypse has started.